Social Analysis

Drawing on the concept of socializing emotions, I compare emotionally charged childrearing practices in two urban contexts. In Helsinki, shame is regularly evoked in children when they behave inappropriately; in Santa Marta, fear is a more common emotional experience in such cases. I argue that these distinct emotional experiences guide children to learn the particular ways of relating to others that are deemed appropriate in each context. The experience of shame in Helsinki promotes children learning compliant autonomy and guides them to learn to avoid overt interpersonal hierarchies. In Santa Marta, fear orients children towards learning and enacting respectful obedience in their everyday interactions, and they learn to manage and navigate within overt interpersonal hierarchies in normative ways.

Policing has long been theoretically linked to the power of the state, but the relationship between police and state has more often been assumed than explored. This article contributes to an emerging anthropology of police that gives insight into how state power is enacted through particular processes or events. It focuses on an event of police accountability: the trial of Philip Brailsford for the on-duty shooting of Daniel Shaver. Through an analysis of trial transcripts, I argue that Brailsford's defense reframed both victim and officer to suggest that Brailsford was a ‘reasonable officer’ who was subject to state power, and that Shaver was legitimately subject to police violence as a ‘suspect’.

In “Dark Anthropology,” Sherry Ortner questions the critical potential of anthropological studies of ethics, and particularly of research focused on studying cultural articulations of the good. She promotes instead the study of people's critiques of the neoliberal darkness that besets their lives. Suggesting that critical, dark anthropology is handicapped by opposing itself to the study of the good, I reconsider the critical potential of the anthropological study of difference. This critical potential has been attenuated, I argue, by relativism's focus on the negative sides of various cultural formations. I argue instead for an approach to difference based on value pluralism and its claims about the diversity of the good. I illustrate the potential of the comparative study of the good in these terms in part by considering contemporary research on prosperity gospel Christianity and also recent work from many parts of the world on hierarchy as a valued social form.